Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

406 Chapter 14
Analyzing Field Notes
I think it’s best to start with the ocular scan method, or eyeballing. In this
low-tech method, you quite literally lay out your notes in piles on the floor.
You live with them, handle them, read them over and over again, tack bunches
of them to a bulletin board, and eventually get a feel for what’s in them. This
is followed by the interocular percussion test, in which patterns jump out and
hit you between the eyes. (If you take your notes on a computer, print them
for this part of the analysis.)
This may not seem like a very scientific way of doing things, but I don’t
know any way that’s better. No researcher, working alone for a year, can produce
more field notes than she or he can grasp by pawing and shuffling
through them. For sheer fun and analytic efficiency, nothing beats pawing and
shuffling through your notes and thinking about them.
Eventually, though, you’ll want to use a text management (TM) program.
It’s not unusual for anthropologists to produce 10,000 words some weeks in
field notes. That’s the equivalent of a 40-page, double-spaced paper, or about
six pages a day. This won’t happen every week, but when you’re doing fieldwork,
bombarded all day long with new sensory experiences and interviewing
informants about topics that really mean something to you, writing 40 pages
of field notes is easy. Even at a more modest clip, you’re likely to accumulate
500–1,000 pages of notes in a year.
That pile of field notes can get pretty intimidating, and the next thing you
know you’re backing away from taking a lot of notes on the theory that fewer
notes are easier to handle. I know; it happened to me, and it has happened to
many of our colleagues. TM software can help.
TM programs make light work out of searching through tons of notes for
combinations of words or phrases. With a TM program, you can ask the computer
questions like: ‘‘Find every note in which I used the word woman but
only if I also used the word migration within three lines of the word woman.’’
Since codes are just words, you can substitute OCM code numbers or in vivo
codes or mnemonic codes in the queries. For example: If you’ve left up to
three lines at the top of each note for topical codes, you’d ask the computer:
‘‘Find 166 and 572.1 if they occur within three lines of one another.’’
TM programs may also tempt you to avoid coding your field notes. Resist
this temptation. You can watch a wedding ceremony for 3 hours, spend a day
and a half writing up 22 pages of notes on your observations, and never use
the words ‘‘marriage’’ in your notes. If you use a text manager to find the word
‘‘marriage,’’ you’ll retrieve all the notes in which you did use that word, but
you won’t find any of the 22 pages where you wrote about that wedding ceremony
you attended.